The One Truth You Should Know That Most Leaders Keep Quiet

While our lives and careers can often find themselves in predictable patterns—go to school, get a job, work hard, and rise to the top—there’s one little secret that most leaders never like to talk about. It’s a subject that can make any one of us anxious to admit. It’s a reality that, at first glimpse, can make us feel vulnerable. But it shouldn’t.

What’s the secret? It’s this: we rose to our leadership positions because we were good at a certain skill not because we were skilled at leading others. We were promoted because we personally created great results. And, now that our job has shifted into a leadership role, we realize that we’re responsible to do the one thing we were never actually trained to do—lead, inspire, and motivate other people to become their best.

“I never saw myself as a leader,” he told us. “I just went to work every day and tried to do my best, while helping the people around me become their best.” This a sentiment many of us share. But these humble words were spoken by David Novak, Founder and CEO of oGoLead and Former Chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, Inc. “Everyone has the power to be a leader but it’s important to realize that you can’t achieve anything big in life if you try to do it alone, you need to take people with you. We all need people to help us along the way,” added Novak. As one of the largest restaurant companies in the world, Yum! has more than 43,000 restaurants in more than 130 countries and territories—think Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC. Novak may not have seen himself as a leader, but plenty of others did. He has been recognized as “2012 CEO of the Year” by Chief Executive magazine, one of the world’s “30 Best CEOs” by Barron’s and one of the “100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World” by Harvard Business Review.

Today, Novak is on a mission to help people who want to become better leaders but aren’t getting the leadership development they want. Studies show that 87 percent of managers agree they wish they had received more management training when they first took on the role. Novak created oGoLead as a solution to address those needs by passing on decades of proven learning from running a global organization.

Novak isn’t alone. “I started my career as an ICU nurse and never thought I’d become CEO,” said Laura Robertson who is now CEO of Banner Desert and Cardon Children’s Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona. The hospital is ranked as one of the top five hospitals in Phoenix, and recognized for eight high-performing specialties, according to U.S. News Best Regional Hospitals report. “As a nurse I remember thinking about how I would do things differently if I were in charge,” she said. “I would think about how employees and patients could be treated better, and how we could serve the community better.” She paused, “But I can’t say I ever saw myself as someone’s boss back then.”

Stories like Novak’s and Robertson’s may at first seem like unlikely cases—where normal, hard working people rise up through the ranks. For some reason many of us like to assume that great executives like these were somehow molded from childhood to become phenomenal leaders. But they weren’t. Instead, they honed their craft and skill. They helped those around them become the best they could be. And someone noticed. Someone saw their potential to be a leader, whether it was a board of directors, another senior leader, or a marketplace looking for change. We’ve seen it in all industries.

“I never had training on how to be a leader, and frankly leadership is earned not given so I’m not sure it’s something that can be learned in a classroom,” said Matt Rizzetta, CEO and Founder of N6A, a public relations and social media agency based in New York and Toronto. “I came from an agency background and couldn’t understand why so many failed to see that the lifeblood of a services business is its people. If people are what makes your business tick, then that needs to be the first place you look to invest and innovate. You need to see the correlation between the service product and the internal culture. The two should be interchangeable. If you create a unique and rewarding internal culture for employees you’ll likely create a unique service experience for customers, and there will be performance benefits for both. That’s why I started my own company—not because I thought I was a leader, but because I knew that, by creating a better environment for employees we would create a better product for clients, and ultimately everybody would win.” It worked. Rizzetta founded N6A during the peak of the economic recession. Since then N6A has been named PRWeek’s 2017 Best Places to Work, a finalist for Digiday’s “Most Innovative Culture” award, and one of the 50 most powerful agencies by the NY Observer.

As we’ve travelled the globe and spoken to leaders from all different industries we’ve come to find the best leaders are open and honest about one simple thing—that they’re in their position not because they were necessarily skilled or credentialed at leading people, but instead because they sincerely cared about other people. They cared about helping others become the best they could be.

Research backs these stories of leadership. A global study of workers in various industries asked, “What one thing could your boss or company do for you that would inspire you to produce great work?” While some of the expected answers like Pay Me More (seven percent), Give Me More Autonomy (12 percent) and Promote Me (four percent) appeared in the survey, the number one answer employees gave, by far, was Recognize Me (37 percent).

This is the one thing leaders need to understand—that a title doesn’t mean you know more, that years on the job don’t always mean you should be making all decisions, and that cheering for your employee’s success is the number one thing you can do as a leader to inspire greatness.

“The question every leader should ask their people is, ‘How can I help you become your best?’ instead of ‘How can you help me?’” - David Novak.